Dark world comes to life

By Valerie Lawson

April 21, 2007 — 10.00am

TUCKED BEHIND THE gargoyles in the vestibule of Oxford Town Hall, Philip Pullman signed his name. Not once, but at least 400 times. Perhaps 500.

Jolly and avuncular at first, the author of the best-selling His Dark Materials trilogy became tetchy as the last autograph hunters lined up, thrusting scraps of paper at him, rather than one of his books.

Who could blame him for wanting to bolt? For the previous 90 minutes he had addressed an Oxford Literary Festival audience of 600 - more men and boys than women and girls - about The Golden Compass, the film adaptation of Northern Lights, volume one of the award-winning trilogy.

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It stars Nicole Kidman as the seductive and terrifying Mrs Coulter, who slithers about in a gold-sequined dress, her hair in the style of a 1930s movie star. Her co-stars are James Bond star Daniel Craig, Bond girl Eva Green and a 12-year-old with the exotic name of Dakota Blue Richards as the heroine, Lyra Belacqua.

The books have sold 14 million copies in 40 countries and more than half a million copies in Australia. The pre-release hype has The Golden Compass as the next Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter combined. Its extraordinary visual effects include a huge menagerie of computer-generated animals that accompany the actors as they move from Oxford to the mysterious North, where children are held captive for sinister purposes.

Before the festival session began, Pullman told me filming was completed at Oxford and at Shepperton Studios in January, while the next few months would be devoted to the complex visual effects.

Images from the film released so far, and a promotional trailer on YouTube, reveal its two worlds as an Oxford of the 1920s with sci-fi elements, and the North as a parallel universe populated by witches and speaking bears clothed in armour. There is also a compass - the alethiometer - that tells the truth and which only Lyra can understand.

The $US150 million ($181 million) movie looks set to be box office gold for producer New Line Cinema, which also produced The Lord of the Rings. A screening of some of the footage will be shown to journalists and distributors next month at the Cannes Film Festival.

In the scraps of pre-publicity released to date, Daniel Craig says he is clinging to Pullman's original text "by his fingernails" and working especially hard not to have the author's religious views watered down.

"The thing is," Craig says, "having spoken to Philip at length - there's nothing anti-religious about this film. It's anti-establishment in a big way and anti-totalitarian and anti-controlling. But essentially it's a film about growing up and how difficult that can be."

For the moment, New Line is keeping publicity to a minimum but Pullman and one of the film's producers, Deborah Forte, spilled some of the secrets to the Oxford Festival faithful. They appeared with the film's visual effects supervisor, Michael Fink, (who directed the first Coca-Cola polar bear TV spot in the '90s, and has since worked on Constantine, Braveheart, Batman Returns, X-Men and X 2) who showed footage of the zeppelin (or "sky ferry") that will transport Mrs Coulter, and two of the animals that are part of Lyra's menagerie.

Forte, a woman of steely determination, described The Golden Compass as "the first full-scale fantasy film that has stars in it". She discounted Ian McKellen in The Lord of the Rings, as "he is not a big-budget star".

Forte and Pullman had a "dream casting session" a decade ago, when she negotiated an option to Pullman's work, to which Pullman added: "I always wanted Nicole Kidman for her extraordinary quality of being warm and cold, terrifying and seductive."

He also envisaged Laurence Olivier, circa 1945, as Lord Asriel, a role eventually taken by Craig because Olivier "wasn't available".

The Golden Compass story begins at the fictional Jordan College, based on Exeter College, Oxford, where Pullman studied English and later returned to teach. He wrote his books in Oxford, in what he calls "a filthy abominable tip" of a garden shed at home.

Pullman said director Chris Weitz filmed scenes at the main quadrangle within Oxford's largest college, Christ Church, but not in the main hall there. That beautiful room had already been used for Harry Potter.

Oxford breeds mystery writers and fantasists. It's a city, as Oscar Wilde said, where "one sees the shadow of things in silver mirrors". So it seems completely right that The Golden Compass was filmed partly in Christ Church, the college of Charles Dodgson, who as Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland.

Both Alice and The Golden Compass are set in two worlds: in peaceful England and in places where anything can happen - where animals talk and certain women have murder on their minds. Other Oxonians in this literary family are J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Although Lewis's and Pullman's religious beliefs are radically different, Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia shares much with The Golden Compass: talking animals, witches and child protagonists travelling to fantasy worlds. But Pullman's coup is all his own: the daemon, pronounced "demon". In The Golden Compass, almost everyone has a daemon, an animal that is another version of the person to whom they belong. They feel the same things, mentally and physically.

The daemon is an idea borrowed from Socrates, who believed he had a divine presence within himself. He called it a "daimon" and it would warn him if he was about to do something bad.

In the vast community that populates online His Dark Materials fan sites such as Bridge to the Stars, members with names such as Aletheia, Merlyn and Dragon of Heaven discuss trilogy esoterica, such as: "What do people's daemons do when their humans have sex?"

For Pullman, the daemon was also a great literary device. As he told the Oxford audience: "The moment I thought of daemons was on the 16th draft of the first chapter. Before that I had to tell the reader what Lyra was thinking. I realised then I didn't have to explain so much. You don't need exposition. Exposition kills the flow of the narrative.

"The best advice ever given to a writer was by Raymond Chandler, who said, 'When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun.' This works. If you're stuck with the story, it moves it on like nothing else."

Lyra's daemon, Pantalaimon, "was my man coming through the door with a gun. It was a wonderful moment when I realised that."

Since Northern Lights was published in 1996, Pullman has won many awards and seen that book, and his subsequent two volumes, adapted for two productions at the National Theatre in London, as well as for audio books and a BBC Radio 4 production.

As president of Scholastic Media, a division of children's publishing and media company Scholastic Corporation, Deborah Forte spends her life trawling for children's books to adapt for other media. She saw Northern Lights in manuscript form and decided that "wherever [Pullman] is going, I want to go".

The first screenwriter chosen to adapt the book was Tom Stoppard, but to the horror of many Pullman fans, Stoppard was fired when Chris Weitz (American Pie, About a Boy) was hired as director. Stoppard said at the time: "As far as I was made aware, New Line Cinema and Philip Pullman all liked it [the script]. Then Chris Weitz got the job. And he likes to write his own scripts."

Forte said at Oxford that "Tom is a brilliant writer" but the studio decided against him. She would not go into detail, but added: "When you're producing a film, you know you can't hold the audience for too long. It's all about making condensed choices."

Pullman chimed in: "I liked what Tom Stoppard wrote very much but I could see the studio's point of view." Reading between the lines, it seems that Stoppard took the story into more complicated realms than New Line thought wise for a teenage audience.

Weitz's path was equally bumpy but he remained on board. At one point he resigned as director, citing technical challenges. The resignation followed an article in The Times that claimed the religious elements of Pullman's work would be toned down, as New Line wanted to ensure the film did not have problems at the American box office.

The British director Anand Tucker briefly replaced him but Weitz eventually returned. Why the revolving door? Forte replied at Oxford: "Weitz realised he made a mistake in pulling out and we gave him a second chance, and he took it.

"Our mantra for the script was 'stick with Lyra'," Forte told the audience, while Pullman said when it came to this movie, "less is more. It's not about bears, it's not about fantasy, it's all about Lyra and her parents."

Dakota Blue Richards (her mother is an American anthropologist, which might explain the name) had never acted before she was cast in the role of Lyra.

"We didn't want an experienced actress," Forte said. "Since she's in every scene but one, that's a big risk. We did four casting calls, had 10,000 girls show up. It was very daunting ... 9999 will be disappointed.

"The irony was that in the first casting session in Cambridge, the most promising candidates emerged. The auditions of the best 40 were put on DVD and sent to Philip," Forte said. "He called me 24 hours later and said, 'I think it will be one of two'. And more than 9000 girls later, it was one of those two."

In the months since filming ended, the big challenge has been to find the balance between the actors and the visual effects. "The unique thing in this film is that the visual effects need to be subtle, because of the daemons," Forte believes. But the effects are already looking astonishing, as the trailer shows. Forte said simply, "Technology has caught up with Philip's imagination."

If it works, the Pullman express could go on forever. "We have a screenwriter working on the second story [in the trilogy]," Forte said, "and an outline for the third."

And Pullman is working on a new Lyra book, The Book of Dust, which will be published in a couple of years or whenever he gets a long spell away from the autograph table.